Agricultural activity has always shared a close bond with the surrounding natural ecosystem as a result of the complex network of interactions occurring between this human activity (technosphere) and the natural environment in which it operates (biosphere) (Schau & Fet, 2008). These interactions have allowed agriculture to use many natural ecosystem services in its production processes (Zhang et al., 2007). At the same time, agriculture has generated
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negative environmental externalities influencing the health and wellbeing of the ecosystem that provides these vital services (Dale & Polasky, 2007; Power, 2010). The list of these externalities is long, and includes greenhouse-gas emissions, pollution due to nutrient run-off, water shortages, soil degradation, loss of biodiversity, and disruption of aquatic ecosystems (Godfray et al., 2010).
Nowadays, the link between agriculture and the ecosystem is of increasing concern, given that
“green revolution” technologies and the associated decades of agricultural intensification, which have succeeded in increasing food production, have also caused extensive environmental damage at the local, regional and global levels of the Earth ecosystem (Matson et al., 1997;
Vitousek et al., 1997; Foley et al., 2005). Humanity has reached the point where “its rapidly growing reliance on fossil fuels and industrialized forms of agriculture could damage the systems” that have kept the Earth in the state suitable for the development of human life, as it may be approaching planetary boundaries for global freshwater use, change in land use, ocean acidification, and interference with the global phosphorus cycle, whereas climate change, biodiversity loss, and nitrogen cycles have already exceeded these boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009). At the same time, at a global level, rising populations and the economic growth of developing countries are leading to a major increase in the demand for food and to changes in food consumption patterns marked by an increase in the proportion of fats and animal proteins in the human diet (Gerbens-Leenes et al., 2010; Godfray et al., 2010). This in turn calls for further increases in agricultural production, putting even greater pressure on scarce natural resources (Gerbens-Leenes et al., 2010). These global trends underscore the importance and urgency of effectively addressing environmental issues in agri-food systems, and demand further exploration of innovative solutions and approaches for successfully dealing with the problems in question.
There are several reasons why farms play such an important role in creating sustainable food chains. First of all, farms are the place where day-to-day decisions regarding the use of economic and environmental resources are made. Taken as a whole, these decisions result in the production of agricultural commodities and services, but also cause negative environmental externalities. Owing to the particular role played in the agricultural production process by land, environmental resource use in agriculture is in many respects highly specific.
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Secondly, once we recognise the role of farms as major environmental impact generators in the food chain, their importance in achieving sustainable food chains becomes even more evident.
For the environmental impacts related to nutrient management, toxicity, phosphorus, and land use in particular, the cradle-to-farm- gate link is responsible for a large share of the impacts generated over the entire food supply chain (e.g. Eide, 2002; Hospido et al., 2003; Gerber et al., 2010; Thoma et al., 2013; Bystricky et al., 2014a for the dairy chain; Korsaeth et al., 2012;
Bystricky et al., 2014a; Kulak et al., 2014 for the bread supply chain). The monitoring, assessment and enhancement of farm environmental performance is therefore an issue of the utmost importance for improving the environmental sustainability of the entire food chain.
Environmental performance is generally defined here as the ability of a farm to comply with the biophysical restrictions (in terms of the use of natural resources and generation of polluting emissions) imposed by the natural ecosystem in which it operates to ensure the short- and long-term provision of the support, regulatory and provisioning services rendered by said natural ecosystem to humanity.
In scientific practice, a plethora of different indicators have been used to measure environmental performance at farm level. In many studies, the definition of these environmental indicators is mainly driven by considerations regarding data availability or data-collection feasibility, without conceptually considering which indicators are actually required for the assessment of farm environmental performance. An absence of conceptual considerations behind the indicators may result in the questionable relevance and usefulness of the indicators thus obtained.
To ensure truly sustainable development in the agri-food sector, it is essential for farm environmental performance indicators to be consistent with the meaning and principles of the sustainability concept originally derived from the macro level. Such indicators aim to compare farms in terms of their relative contribution to environmental sustainability, and ultimately to improve environmental performance. Taking the macro-level environmental sustainability concept as its point of departure, this paper therefore aims (i) to develop ideas on how to implement the environmental sustainability concept at farm level, and (ii) to build on these ideas in order to propose a sound framework for defining and measuring environmental performance at farm level.
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Our research makes a threefold contribution to the discussion on farm environmental performance assessment. Firstly, our work focuses exclusively on defining and measuring environmental performance at farm (i.e. micro-) level. Secondly, the development of environmental performance indicators starts with and is based on consideration of the importance and implications of the macro-level environmental sustainability concept for the definition and measurement of environmental performance at farm level, which to the best of our knowledge is the main uniqueness of our work. The development of indicators is thus rooted in a more general context ensuring that the developed indicators are consistent with the macro-level environmental sustainability concept as viewed from an ecological perspective. Thirdly, our considerations attempt to reconcile different perspectives, namely the macro- vs. the micro-perspective, and the economists' vs. the natural scientists' view.
The present paper is organised as follows: Section 2.2 provides a literature review of the typologies of indicators designed to measure farm-level environmental performance. This section does not purport to provide an exhaustive, in-depth review of all existing indicators.
Rather, its main general objective is to classify the existing range of indicators into different types and – based on selected examples of types of farm environmental performance indicators – to show how limited some indicators may be, and why it is essential to consider the meaning behind farm environmental performance if we wish to move towards greater sustainability in agricultural production. Section 2.3 deals with the theoretical underpinnings of our work, focusing on the concepts of environmental sustainability and carrying capacity. The aim of this section is to provide a sound basis for implementing the macro-level environmental sustainability concept in farm environmental performance indicators. In Section 2.4, we propose the framework for defining and measuring environmental performance at farm level, followed by a discussion in Section 2.5 and conclusions in Section 2.6.
2.2 MEASURING ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE AT FARM